Corn Maze

One of the fun things The Wife and I did on our last day in Wisconsin was to stop off and get gas on our way in to O'Hare. We'd noticed gas prices varying wildly on the side of I-94, so we tried our luck driving a couple miles off the interstate between Burlington (home of Tony Romo) and Racine. Along the way, we saw a farm that had a corn maze. We had some time on or hands before we had to be at the airport so we took some time to enjoy this rural attraction. This is what it looks inside a corn maze:

We were in the maze late enough in the day that the shadows pointed west, so we always knew the compass points. But once you get about five feet into the corn, there is nothing else you can see but the stalks. If you did the corn maze around noon, you wouldn't even have shadows to point you in the right direction.

We also enjoyed some of the animals that were on display -- a razorback hog and some goats, and in a separate pen, some tame llamas. Some of the goats were quite clever and one could climb up ramps to elevated feeding stations:

We also bought some "Packer Corn," which has a mixture of green and yellow kernels. The Wife will tack the corn to our front door as a decoration in a few days. It earned her an interesting comment from the security screener at O'Hare who could only see the outline of the corn on his X-ray machine.

Also on our way out of town, we realized that no trip to Wisconsin could be complete without stopping to buy souvenirs for people back at home. So we stopped at the Mars Cheese Castle. I took a picture of it so that you'll know that yes, such a thing really exists:


No photoshop was used in the making of this photograph.

My new paralegal had asked me for some Wisconsin cheese. So I got her a cheese shaped like the state of Wisconsin at the Mars Cheese Castle. The kitsch factor is off the scale here. And it turned out to be a good thing we stopped there, too -- traffic in Illinois is awful, thanks to construction on the Interstate Tollway from the Wisconsin border all the way to O'Hare. We ate the cheese curds and summer sausage bits that we had intended for the plane trip in the car instead. Delicious.